Maybe Your Kids Don't Want To Play Sports

Has this happened to you? Your daughter comes home from soccer
practice and defiantly declares, “I can’t stand my coach, my team is awful and
I don’t even like soccer. I
quit!” Your parental thermostat
kicks in as you try to gently lower the temperature in the room with those
responses that all kids despise, “Oh, come on now, it can’t be that bad” or
“But you’re good at soccer” and finally, “You know our rule, once you start
something, you have to finish it. You can’t quit.”

You’ll talk to her coach,
you’ll buy her new cleats, even get her on a better team. But as parents, we often don’t even
consider the remote possibility that… wait for it…. our child does not want to
play soccer, or basketball or golf or even Aussie rules football.

Well-meaning articles about the
tragedy of kids quitting sports are just a Google search away (heck, I even
wrote one.)Usually, we place the blame elsewhere
with the assumption that all kids love sports, so if mine doesn’t then
something must be wrong with the system.Instead, we should delve deeper into the unique interests and needs of
our son or daughter to find out if there is a better matched activity out there
that doesn’t involve a ball, puck or $200 shoes.

“The act of play itself may be outside of ‘normal’ activities,”
he wrote in Play. “The result [of
play] is that we stumble upon new behaviors, thoughts, strategies, movements,
or ways of being. We see things in a different way and have fresh insights.”

Since the 2009 release of his book and his corresponding TED talk, which has had close to 1 million
views, the science of play has received some serious attention.This week at Clemson University, over
200 attendees heard Brown’s keynote speech at the 2014 conference of the US
Play Coalition, a cross-section of academics, recreation
professionals and health care experts.Dozens of sessions focused on one single objective, getting kids into
play activities that they enjoy.

To help organize all of these activities into a framework based
on research, Brown introduced seven “patterns
of play” that captures the evolution of fun interactions throughout
a child’s life.

-Attunement Play
- getting connected to each other

-Body Play and
Movement - learning how we move in the world

-Object Play -
understanding physical objects and how to interact with them

-Social Play -
getting along with others

-Imaginative and
Pretend Play - exploring other possibilities

-Storytelling and
Narrative Play - building communication skills

-Transformative,
Integrative and Creative Play - problem solving with creativity

Part of Brown’s ongoing research is to understand how each of
these play states changes the brain and benefits child development.“Neuroscientists, developmental
biologists, psychologists, social scientists, and researchers from every point
of the scientific compass now know that play is a profound biological process,”
Brown said in a recent presentation.

While youth sports can fulfill one or two of the “patterns of
play”, your child may need new opportunities to grow and develop.Sit down with each of your kids and
take Thrively’s Strength Explorer.Explore other possibilities.It’s OK if there is no trophy at the
end of the day.